I have a blog that gets the usual spam, which Akismet is pretty good with. Not good enough for me to turn off moderation just yet.
I am wondering is there a way to "whitelist" a list of readers so their comments can skip moderation and just get posted?

I also blacklist spam pingback domains so I don't get to see their pingbacks, and on rare occasions I also do the same with an email address or IP addresses - for instance recently there was a whole datacenter with multiple servers having a conversations with themselves, so I just blocked based on the first 2 numbers in the IP address which were common to the servers and I made sure were assigned to the one datacenter.